Advertising Globalisation in Africa

Advertising Globalization

In Africa as you turn on Sky News an advertisement by DHL, the global courier company extols, unsurprisingly, the virtues of open trade. Bored,you turn to CNN and suddenly there is a very similar sounding advertisement from Samsung extoling the virtues of borderless trade. This is a new and very sudden change in advertising strategy from these great transnational companies that normally targets competitors like Apple or UPS. Now they are selling ideas as they have come to understand that their profitability is  now more seriously threatened by the ideological shift against globalization that is occurring throughout the world than by what any competitor can produce in direct competition with their own products.

What has happened that suddenly large transnationals feel so threatened that they need to devote considerable resources to ‘educate the public’ about the virtues of globalization. For an entire generation from the election of Presidents Reagan and Margret Thatcher in the UK in 1979/80 there has been a global consensus that that open global trade was in everyone’s interests along with low taxes on the rich, small government and an elimination of regulations was a free market formula that was unassailable part of the successful Anglo-Saxon model of economic management.

But suddenly thisfree market consensus looks like it is about to dissolve with the rise of Donald Trump in the US,Marine Le Pen in France, UKIP and  theBrexit vote in the UK along with a host of other minor right wing parties throughout Europe and Asia the consensus of the free market economists that free trade was in everyone’s interestis no longer a consensus. It is the right and not the left of the political spectrum that has more correctly gauged the mood of the electorate and is, at least in rhetoric the greatest single threat to the globalization consensus. This is what makes the transnationals so jittery. The Republican party, the UK conservatives and even the extreme right in Europe could in the past assure their patrons in these companies that come what may the global economy would remain open for business. And yet now these allies now  appear to be the greatest threat to their prosperity

 The last four decades has seen the change in the distribution of income in developed and developing countries towards those that are rich. Elites in developing countries in Africa have been enriched by their place in the global value chain but Africa still, despite empty rhetoric from capitals produces nothing but raw materials and imports consumer goods from the developed world and the BRICs.

In all fairness to the free trade economists, none, not even its most ardent supporters have ever argued that there would not be losers from free trade. They only argued as long as the winners could compensate the losers then free trade was apositive development. But the operative word was ‘could’ and not ‘should’. For many western workers, who are the bulwark of the new right wing anti-globalization consensus, globalization and rapid technological change caused by the ICT revolution have been a personal disaster. They have moved from income security in the 1970s’ and 1980’s to feeling increasingly vulnerable with the rise of China, paid technological change and global trade now. Workers in the developed world were not compensated for the impact of globalization. Globalization gave them cheap goods at Walmart and that was widely seen by policy makers as being enough. Importantly the last 30 years saw the return of China to its rightful place in human history as the world’s largest economy and this process alleviated the poverty of hundreds of millions of its people.

This was of course cold solace to the European and American working man who has seen growth and their standard of living slowly ebb away over time. But there was one other important beneficiary of these global changesand that was those who owned, traded and financed the Asian companies that increasingly produce everything that the world now consumes. Aided by tax laws in Europe and North America these elites have used the system of tax havens in in North America (e.g.  Delaware) and the EU (e.g. Luxemburg, Switzerland and the City of London) as well those in developing countries to avoid or evade their tax obligations which would enable governments to pay compensation to those who have lost out.

In time the transnationals will get better at trying to sell the message of ‘globalization good, economic nationalism, bad’.But right now their advertisements on Sky and CNN look utterly absurd, like they are preaching to the converted, speaking to those who can afford cable TV and are the beneficiaries of globalization rather than speaking to the ‘peasants’ directly. But it is not the message that needs to change but an understanding that the game is up, and those who have not benefited from the dramatic economic changes of the last generation have metaphorically, ‘gone home to get their pitch-forks’. Without serious policy change that better distributes the opportunities and benefits of global trade and technological change we will see a repetition of the closure of this second age of globalization. The first age- at the beginning of the 20^th century came to a crashing and disastrous end a century ago with the beginning of World War I.

These are the views of Professor Roman Grynberg and not necessarily those of UNAM where he is employed.